Time, moments, technology & memories
🔊 The 1980s are now as far away in time for our children as World War Two was for us back then when our parents were telling us stories. Life is fleeting.
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2023 is here already. We will be back in Spain tomorrow to get going with the mega election year that awaits the country. You will get all the updates here on The Spain Report. Time flies, doesn’t it? The photo above is my grandparents’ house when we were kids, where we spent summer holidays and long weekends (keep reading for the 1980s’ version). In my mind, the memories from forty years ago are still there, full of colour and fun and family and games and cakes and Grandad’s big boots and his Land Rover and radio—he was a forest ranger—and Nan making lots of cakes and my uncle wandering around the fields in his wellies with a shotgun. I still remember the sound of the curlews on the fields, or night-time trips out for fish and chips, or how bitterly cold it was in the winter if you moved away from the coal fire in the living room. We all went back for a visit this Christmas with our kids and it was very strange to be there again with all the memories.
Chatting with my uncle, now almost retired himself, and pretty much looking like Grandad (his father) does in my head, we could both still see all those things happening 40 years ago and for some reason we remember it either sunny in the summer or very cold in the winter covered in deep snow. The rainy days, which in deepest Lancashire (north of England) was most of them, did not register as much. Our kids played together in the woods and looked on in horror at the big wet, windy hills we were marched up as kids on days out but from the perspective of 10-year olds or teenagers today in the 2020s, the 1980s is now as far away as the 1940s and World War Two was for us when we were their age four decades ago and our parents and grandparents were telling us stories. Ancient times, back with the dinosaurs when life was lived in black-and-white with no Internet.
The boys were eager to get out of the cold and back to their Xboxes and Switches. My Granny, who passed away during the pandemic at the age of 99, used to say the thing that marvelled her most was being able to chat to her great-grandchildren live via Skype from 1,000 km away. She still remembered her father taking her to the village post office in the 1920s to see the first telephone. In the space of those 100 years or so, what had been normal life for everybody on the planet for millenia up to that point has been radically transformed by science, technology, medicine and agriculture. No phones or cars or planes for my grandparents when they were boys and girls but for today’s children, the Internet and mobiles and cheap airliners to travel across continents in hours for Christmas holidays are as ubiquitous and obvious as turning on the tap for water. The old black-and-white photos, or the 1980s colour photos, when you had to wait a week to see what you’d actually taken, are precious family or social memories that did not exist in those earlier millenia and centuries but their closeness to reality is like the memories we have in our minds. They could only use the technology they had.
Time and events and lives are fleeting, for both families and societies as a whole. Not only for major national, historic events but also for family memories. I have mentioned image and sound quality before in reference to journalism and larger events, but wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have today’s 4K image and great audio quality for those bits of personal history too? It’s not just the restored YouTube footage of very rare moments at the turn of the 20th Century or the fantastic colorisation of well-known historical photos. Who would not like to look back at those top-quality videos of the favourite bits of their childhood and listen to Granny and Grandad again? We should make the most of the technology in our pockets today, as journalists for society and as parents for our families, to grab those brief, passing moments while we can. Our children and future generations will thank us for it one day.
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